August 15, 2014

Elsewhere (133)

The black student had jokingly named his beer pong team “Team Nigga” and would shout the name whenever the team scored. At some point, the white student - reprising a running joke on the football team, in which black students would greet white teammates with the phrase “White power!” - said, “Can I get a white power?” The black student replied, “White power!” The noise from the party awakened a student in another room in the residence hall… She reported this exchange to the Campus Living office, and an inquisition began.

The two students were charged with inflicting “physical or mental harm” and “discrimination or harassment,” as well as with disorderly conduct… Within days after the hearing, the two were found guilty of all charges, placed on probation, and ordered on threat of suspension to undergo “bias reduction training.” The ruling stated, without any support, that their “language had contributed to the creation of a hostile and discriminatory environment.” Rarely does the modern left’s humourlessness, authoritarianism, and subversion of its own goals come together as starkly as in this case.

This story didn’t get much play in the mainstream media but it tells you everything you need to know about the public health racket, from the headline down: “‘We will push for a law if we don’t get support,’ warns health group.” Yeah, that’s the spirit. If people don’t agree with you, force them.

And via Hal, Robyn Urback on the intolerant psychodramas of the Proletarian Feminist Front and their comrades-in-shouting:

By the protesters’ later account, however, their rebellion was akin to confronting and conquering proponents of “misogynist” messaging. (The event was actually about the struggles men and fathers face in family court, but that doesn’t really matter). On the Revolutionary Student Movement website, a blog post subsequently bragged that, “Revolutionaries shut down [a] Men’s Rights Activists event at the University of Toronto.” The protesters’ post reads like a passage from George Orwell’s Animal Farm, written in the style of a supervillain manifesto.

What occurs to me about these delusional tools - besides their mental conformity, their vanity, and their belief that the campus belongs to them and is theirs to disrupt – is that their places could have been taken by students who don’t strive to silence facts and ideas, and who actually want to learn something. Perhaps even a skill that’s of value to others and will thereby earn them a living. There must be thousands of much smarter, more honest people – people who don’t imagine themselves as Maoist “revolutionaries” - who would eagerly use the opportunity that these obnoxious little parasites are squandering.

As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for.

That’s the thing. The realities of Mao’s “Cultural Revolution” and all of its hideous variants are easy enough to find, indeed hard to miss. 30 seconds with Google should do it. So are these clowns just pretending to be neo-Maoist totalitarians – because that’s what cool kids do, apparently – or are they actually unable to process reality and register their own absurdity? I mean, are they just poseurs who pretend pathologically, or are they so unmoored from reality they actually believe that, given sufficient power, they would make the world better?

So are these clowns just pretending to be neo-Maoist totalitarians – because that’s what cool kids do, apparently – or are they actually unable to process reality and register their own absurdity

Things pondered for years...

I mean, are they just poseurs who pretend pathologically, or are they so unmoored from reality they actually believe that, given sufficient power, they would make the world better?

Perhaps, but most of their professors are. I tend to give students the benefit of doubt, though they do provide the masses. But that's a factor of youth and insecurity that comes with it. The desire, searching to be a part of something greater. It's their professors who really piss me off. And most of them are doing it with our tax dollars. They provide the positive reinforcement to any radical, stupid idea that comes down the pike in the name of "alternative" or "radical" thinking.

Wish I had time to express this more clearly and thoughtfully, but I gotta run. It's Shark Week. Too long and complicated to explain.

. . . on an other hand, rather than having to declare the glories of being the Advance Front of The Preliminary Discussion Movement of The Albino Chipmunk Liberation Front, when something is actually needed, actual administrators and coordinators just seem to just get things done by us, or we decided, or did, or . . .

I soooooooooooo thought that "Proletarian Feminist Front" was a hilarious David-ism to describe the usual bunch of campus rabble. Then i clicked through to the article...

It does make me yearn for the ability to hire a group of football hooligans for security, announce that protesters have 30 seconds to shut up and leave or else, with the hope the lads have had too much lager and the femi-nazis are too impressed with themselves to make for the exits.

I wonder what would happen if the the Lewis & Clark College football team went on strike over the treatment of their team-mates? Perhaps the pencil-pushers who threw the book at them can take to the pitch in their place ...

It helps if you think of academia, the Clown Quarter at least, as the left’s proving ground, a small-scale model of utopia - of how the rest of us should be, or be made to be. It’s where leftist attitudinising is of great importance, a thing on which careers can depend, and where it can flourish with minimal testing and very little adult dissent.

Speaking as someone who was once kept after diversity training class and lectured in front of my coworkers as they passed, I see nothing disturbing about that video. It has it's strawman issues but on the whole, it was far superior to many of the sort of so-called diversity training classes that I've attended. And I'm guessing my employer paid far more than 800 bucks for our crap training.

I rolled my eyes when presented with BS urban legend stories they fed us. One of which, ironically, was at one time denounced on Snopes as being rabidly racist itself. It seems since the last time I checked this story on Snopes, they've dialed down the denunciation. I wonder what prompted that:

Mr. Kahan’s study suggests that more people know what scientists think about high-profile scientific controversies than polls suggest; they just aren’t willing to endorse the consensus when it contradicts their political or religious views. This finding helps us understand why my colleagues and I have found that factual and scientific evidence is often ineffective at reducing misperceptions and can even backfire on issues like weapons of mass destruction, health care reform and vaccines. With science as with politics, identity often trumps the facts.

The authors found that, on average, those who had East German roots cheated twice as much as those who had grown up in West Germany under capitalism. They also looked at how much time people had spent in East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The longer the participants had been exposed to socialism, the greater the likelihood that they would claim improbable numbers of high rolls.

If you download Lantern in an uncensored region, you can connect with someone in a censored region, who can then access whatever content they want through you. What makes the system so unique is that it operates on the basis of trust.

. . . .

Last November, an Iranian satellite TV station reached out to do a story about Lantern. At that point, Lantern was still invite-only, but the station asked Fisk if he would make it so viewers of the show could immediately download it without having to have any special personal connections to current users. Fisk acquiesced and began allowing direct downloads to access a special “untrusted” portion of the Lantern network. Iranians began downloading the program en masse almost immediately and, soon after, people in China followed suit with nearly 20,000 people using the program in just a few weeks.

The Internet may be losing the war against trolls. At the very least, it isn’t winning. And unless social networks, media sites and governments come up with some innovative way of defeating online troublemakers, the digital world will never be free of the trolls’ collective sway.

That’s the dismal judgment of the handful of scholars who study the broad category of online incivility known as trolling, a problem whose scope is not clear, but whose victims keep mounting.

Lantern is interesting. Hopefully one day soon it wont be necessary to use such tools.

When I was Iran we had no trouble setting up a proxy. And I'm told you can go to a net-cafe, in public, and the staff will set up a proxy for you. Obviously this is not ideal due to security concerns, but it was interesting to see a kind of general apathy about these obvious breaches of censorship law.